“Well, Daddy’s dead,” I said. “And so is Gammy. And Izzy. That’s it, I think.”
“Izzy?” she said, startled. Izzy was the one man she had been with since my father’s death twenty-five years ago. “Did I kill him?”
“No, he only died.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“I’m going to be arrested tonight. You won’t be able to reach me in the box. I can’t make anybody believe me here, either. They really make themselves look human.”
A nurse came into the room, picked up the chart at the end of the bed, and gave it a brief glance. “She’s writing constantly,” the nurse said. “She thinks she’s been a very bad person and has hurt a lot of people, and she wants to confess. She seems very tormented. Maybe you should come back later.”
“I’ll stay,” I said. I’d come again from California for a visit, expecting to see her at Summerville. I got back only two or three times a year.
My mother looked at the nurse. “You’re one of them,” she said.
“She’s just a nurse, Mom,” I said. “Mom, how are you feeling?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear. She looked terrible. Her left lower eyelid sagged. Her arms were blotched with bruises. Her short, gray-blonde hair was sticking up like a rooster’s comb. I went over and hugged her carefully, avoiding the IV pole.
“Okay, not so good, how are you,” she said flatly.
“Are they taking good care of you?”
“Oh, yes. How’s your daughter, her dad—”
“Mom, how are you feeling?”
“Got any good—writing students?”
By now, well into her eighties and Parkinson’s decline, my mother had her usual strategies of deflection narrowed down to a few repetitive questions.
“I’m here, Mom. You can talk to me. Do you want to talk to me?”
“Not really.”
I stayed until she fell asleep. The next day, she was committed to the Geriatric Psych Ward at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. The doctors had decided she was a suicide risk because of the drugs she’d taken at Summerville. It was true that my mother wanted to die, and I didn’t blame her one bit. She was a mess. “Just pull the plug when I’m too far gone,” she used to say, but there wasn’t any plug to pull. She was stuck with living.
At the psych ward, the young psychiatrist who met with me and my brothers Gary and Rick suggested electroshock therapy. Our mother had been practically catatonic since arriving that morning. I thought that I, myself, would be catatonic if I found myself living on a gurney in the hallway of a psych ward, dressed in a peekaboo gown and slippers that looked like they’d come from a discount bin at the Dollar Store, with an orange band on my wrist that read HIGH FALL RISK and my name written on a piece of paper taped to my glasses. Also, it was a few days before Christmas. Locked into a ward with paper snowflakes and piped-in Christmas Muzak—who wouldn’t curl up inside herself and wait for the nightmare to be over?
“Visitors may not be beneficial,” the psychiatrist told us. She looked about twelve. What did she know about anything? We said no to the electroshock, and I got a room at the nearby Holiday Inn.
I sat at a table in the Holiday Inn lounge at 10:00 p.m. with my notebook and a glass of wine. At the bar, two airline pilots were flirting with the bartender, telling her the Japanese phrases they knew. I wrote in my notebook,
Mom on psych ward notes.
I wrote down more crazy things she’d said, and phrases like white matter damage and Lewy Body Dementia. I noted that she was in Room 7, Bed 2, Ward 12A, as though fixing things in place—her words, her diagnosis, her exact location—could somehow change her circumstances.
In the morning I grabbed a bagel and coffee and went back to the ward. By the end of the day, she wasn’t catatonic anymore. She sat in a chair in the room they’d finally given her, her gown pulled up, her feet propped on a chair, and I rubbed Curél on her legs. Her skin was practically transparent, like vellum. I could see the veins under the skin, like one of those anatomical drawings showing the circulatory system. When someone walked by in the hall I tugged her gown lower.
“For modesty’s sake,” I said.
She looked at me, and we both burst out laughing.
“I guess that boundary got crossed a while ago,” I said.
We played gin, the rules for which neither of us could quite remember. How many cards were you supposed to have in your hand? How many could you just jettison? I read to her from a big, hardcover best-selling novel. Every sentence dragged along, saddled with an unhealthy load of clichés and adverbs. It was the writer’s thirtieth book. It was likely she didn’t even write them anymore, just farmed them out to other bad writers to keep the franchise going. This book was basically supersized fast-food crap. It was a McBook with no nutritional value.
“This is a good story,” my mother said.
“Yes, it is,” I said, though what I wanted to say was, This is a terrible story. This story sucks. I hate this story.
She thought the staff was poisoning her. “They look like they’re human, but they come from space,” she said. “I see them at night, coming down through the ceiling.” When an orderly brought in dinner, she eyed the applesauce but wouldn’t touch it. I picked up the plastic cup, peeled it open, and ate a spoonful, then feigned a sudden convulsion. This was probably not the best way to lighten the mood. For an instant she looked at me in complete panic.
“Just kidding,” I said. “See? The package was sealed.”
“I’m still suspicious,” she said.
The next day, she said something uncharacteristic—that is, something truthful—about our family. “Daddy wanted kids, wanted a family,” she said. “But then he couldn’t handle it.”
It was true that neither of our parents could really handle us. We were like those complicated gadgets you buy with high hopes, but soon grow frustrated trying to figure out. Then you stick them in the back of the closet. Also, the gadget that was their firstborn son was a little mentally ill, frequently malfunctioning, and attacking the other, weaker gadgets. Our father’s strategy was to make himself scarce, traveling with ball teams or earning his plaque at the bar in the Touchdown Club in DC—Addie’s End. Our mother’s was to make sure she saw us mostly on the tennis court. Gary once dubbed her Wire Monkey Mother, after the 1950s experiment: Scientists attached a bottle to a wire “monkey” with a plastic face. The baby monkeys got their milk from it, but they spent most of their time with Terry Cloth Mother, because cuddling was more important. This experiment made the monkeys crazy later in life, especially the females. They’d rock back and forth, holding themselves. They had terrible sex lives, and the ones that became mothers either ignored their babies or killed them.
But deep down, I understood by the time she was in the psych ward, my mother was all terry cloth.
“I’ve been a stinking mother,” she said.
“No, you haven’t,” I said, and hugged her.
“I’m so afraid,” she said.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I lied, and hugged her again, holding her longer, feeling how thin and small she had become.
I went back to the Holiday Inn that night and typed up my notes, as usual, wondering what I was going to do with them. Who wanted to hear that my mother was really made of terry cloth? Who wanted to hear that a woman who had once been a champion athlete couldn’t manage to button her blouse? This was life. It was hard to swallow. No wonder people reached for the salty, sugary crap that said everything was fine.
The next afternoon, we went into the room where the patients were being served lunch. Two conference tables had been pushed together. Everyone hunched over them, eating from trays of shitty psych ward food: Styrofoam cups of pea soup, mashed potatoes (probably the kind I grew up on, that came from a box—just add water), a damp roll with a
butter pat, a chicken breast that tasted like an oven mitt, additive-filled vanilla ice cream in a cup. How was anyone supposed to get better on a diet like this? Next to me was a guy I’d heard earlier in the hall outside my mother’s room.
“How about a song for you?” he’d said to the young psychiatrist, launching into a spirited rendition of “My Girl.” After the chorus, he scatted a little, oom-bah-oom-bah-dah-dee-dah.
“That’s very good,” the doctor said. “And you’re your own backup, too.”
“I want to get out of here someday some shape some way. I need my dialysis tomorrow.”
“You can get that while you’re here. How are you feeling?”
“Except for a little headache, I’m feeling pretty good.” He sounded cheerful.
“Let’s wait and see how you do tomorrow,” the doctor said.
That’s it, I thought. Today you’re happy. Better wait a bit, though, since tomorrow you may be miserable. What kind of philosophy was that? Why couldn’t the doctor just say, “Merry Christmas”? It was Christmas now, Christmas on the psych ward, though there was no tree festooned with lights and ornaments, and no wrapped presents, no stockings hanging by the fireplace. There was no fireplace. There used to be one, in the house I grew up in. There used to be a family, dysfunctional though it was, our lives bound together under a single roof. Now the roof was gone. This, too, was life.
In the lunchroom, on a shelf, a radio was playing seventies music. The room was windowless. Clearly we were trapped in time and space. Neither Santa Claus nor Jesus was on his way anytime soon.
“God will put a star in your crown for taking care of your mother,” the woman across the table said to me. She was wearing a fur coat on her head the first day I saw her. This morning she was spinning in the hall with her arms out, wrapped in a sheet and a pink boa. I had dubbed her Bling-bling because her top front teeth were all gold. For lunch she had changed into a green turban and flowing purple caftan. She looked regal.
I wanted to explain that I hadn’t taken care of my mother all that much. I was just the daughter visiting from California. Gary was the caretaker. I was the writer. I would go back to California and try to put my notes into some kind of order, not sure what story I wanted to tell. I would think about reading a poem to my mother in the psych ward, a poem about my brother Jon’s liver transplant ten years before, and how she cried, and how I felt I’d made a terrible mistake and caused her greater sadness. But then she wanted to hear it again. Jon was still alive then, and it was a hopeful poem, a poem of gratitude to the person who’d donated his liver so my brother could still have a life.
“Great,” I said to Bling-bling. “The last star I stuck in there fell out.”
“God doesn’t test us,” Bling-bling said, apropos of nothing, it seemed.
“What about Job?” I opened the mashed potatoes for my mother. They were encased in a black plastic container covered by a clear plastic bell. Without me there to open the thing, the potatoes might as well have been locked in a vault. My mother barely had the strength to lift her plastic spoon.
“Oh, Job was a good man,” Bling-bling said. “They tried to get him to renounce God, but he wouldn’t do it.”
“But God killed all his cattle and destroyed his crops,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t remember whether God did these things or just let Satan do them, but what was the difference? If you tried the two in a court of law, God would be doing time, too.
A spoonful of potatoes fell on my mother’s blouse. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Also, God killed Job’s children,” I added, suddenly remembering.
“Well, he got those children back.” Bling-bling was unshakable.
No, he didn’t, I wanted to tell her. He got other children, but that wasn’t the same thing. What he lost, not even God could return to him.
“God don’t kill nobody,” she said serenely.
Now the Spinners came on the radio. Whenever you want me, I’ll be there. Bling-bling started singing along, so I did, too—though only on the chorus, because it was all I knew.
My mother dropped her spoon in her lap, mashed-potato-side down, and I picked it up and wiped it on a napkin and started to hand it back to her, but she had closed her eyes. She was shifting her shoulders a little, raising the right one and then the left, in barely perceptible movements. She lifted her hands just above the table, so they hovered over her meal like two little spaceships above a tiny city—maybe one they were planning to destroy, or maybe one they had come to in peace, to teach us how to cope with the pain and loss of life on earth.
Then I saw that my mother was trying to snap her fingers and couldn’t, quite. But for the couple of minutes until the song ended, looking as though she were in a kind of beautiful trance, she danced.
Acknowledgments
THANKS FIRST TO my agent, Rob McQuilkin, for his savvy and his support, and to everyone at Penguin for true enthusiasm. To Elizabeth Sanderson for being an amazing and generous friend and roommate. To the also amazing and generous Marie-Elizabeth Mali. To my brother, Gary Addie, who understands the whole story of our family and has provided me with so many moments of grace. To the anthology editors who invited me to write essays that wouldn’t otherwise exist. To Donna Masini for the photo shoot in her kitchen and for being beautiful in a million ways. To Susan Browne, for all the conversations before we die and are put into the Christmas tree forever. And thanks to my daughter, Aya Cash, whose love always, always sustains me.
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